Taking account of culture in delivering better education outcomes: lessons from Iraq

Iraq’s education sector has been in rapid decline since the 1980s. Once the beacon of high-quality education in the region, declining investment and diversion of funds to military spending has had a severe impact on quality... [ view full abstract ]

Iraq’s education sector has been in rapid decline since the 1980s. Once the beacon of high-quality education in the region, declining investment and diversion of funds to military spending has had a severe impact on quality and equity. In 2011 the British Council embarked on ‘Support to Improving Education in Iraq’ supported by the European Union. The project aimed to improve the quality and standards of the learning experience, pedagogical skills and leadership and management of staff development. It also supported school self-evaluation and development planning in primary and secondary schools. The project was highly successful and reached five times more participants than originally planned.

This paper examines a narrative stream that emerged during project implementation that profiled and prioritised working with Iraqi culture and history in order to successfully deliver the project. Showing alignment with other current narratives around development effectiveness that focus on genuinely locally led work and the importance of culture in supporting behaviour change, the project generated an approach that contributes to the understanding of development effectiveness by starting to define a ‘cultural relations approach’ to education reform.

We develop and profile three emergent features of this approach: understanding, collaboration and trust based on findings from the project evaluation, semi-structured interviews with project participants and evaluation of project documents. The paper also identifies the implementation methodologies which supported these features and makes a set of recommendations for culturally sensitive programming based on these.